book details

Book: The Bride's Trunk - A Story of War and Reconciliation by Ingrid Dixon

categories: Book, War, Peace, Reconciliation, Nonfiction, History, Women, Germany, England, Memoir, Aachen, Third Reich, Relationship, Family Memoir

Ingrid Dixon

about this book: • "This book opens up a chapter in our history that has seldom been told and should be."

• "Beautifully told, it stays with you long after the last page is sadly turned."

• "Ingrid Dixon's book provides vivid historical context for her parents' war-time love story."

The unassuming piece of luggage of the title travelled with its various owners around pre-war Europe and accompanied Minny as she fled her devastated home city in October 1944. It crossed the English Channel in 1946 as Minny travelled to marry her British soldier fiancé. In bomb-damaged Liverpool, she was surprised by the warm welcome of her new English family. Neither her childhood in Weimar Germany and adolescence in the Third Reich nor her wartime experience had prepared her for a new life in austerity Britain.

This true story is both a deeply researched social history and a family memoir, with almost 100 authentic images and original documents. In it, Ingrid Dixon explores the story of her German mother and British father, who met in the chaos of post-war Germany. There were many such marriages, but the book's uniqueness is that it is written by the child of such a couple and examines the issues of growing up in two cultures.